Those benchmarks are completely useless. All they do is connect to wifi and refresh the browser endlessly until the battery run out, with a static brightness settings. It does not tell you anything at all about battery life in real life usage.

Those benchmarks are completely useless. ... It does not tell you anything at all about battery life in real life usage.

Not completely useless. They do tell you about relative battery life. And, relatively speaking, it would appear the 2014 G gets about 28% less runtime than the 2013 G.

I am mildly surprised by two things: 1. That Lenovorola did not use some of the new case space to add a couple hundred mAh to the battery and 2. That, given that, nobody other than The Verge has so far done any runtime tests.

The display is about 11% bigger and they've added 5GHz WiFi to the thing. Those are the only two things I see that might increase power consumption. ISTM that's bound to have an impact, but 28% impact? Seems like a lot, to me.

I found the plastics to be ok! The backings are nice and for a phone for the price of less than $200 what can you expect?....Metal? Not calling you out but what would you like to see change?

His syntax is a bit tortured, so it's hard to say, but I don't think plastic was his point. I believe his point was they're missing the boat if they upped the display and fixed the camera (allegedly pretty weak on the original "G"), but lost nearly 1/3 of the previous version's awesome runtime in the process.

That's a 13% difference. Less than half the difference that The Verge measured. That seems a bit more in-line with what I would have expected, and not at all unreasonable. That means if you got, say, 14 hours out of an OG (a number I recall from an OG review, somewhere), you can expect about 12 from an NG in the same use.